Walter Cole Just Call Me Darcelle

That’s no lady; that’s Darcelle.

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“The first time I put on a dress, I was
37.” That’s a surprising statement coming from female impersonator
Walter Cole, better known as Darcelle XV, doyenne of the West Coast’s
longest-running drag show and Portland’s unofficial welcome wagon for
the past four decades.

The Oregon-born Cole turned 80 last year and the slim volume Just Call Me Darcelle
(Createspace, 134 pages, $14.95), written with Sharon Knorr (the
director of his 2010 one-man show of the same name), chronicles the
meandering path a shy, “four-eyed sissy boy” took from living as a
suburban Southeast Portland married father of two to riding atop a
stagecoach in feathers as the grand marshal of Portland’s Gay Pride
Parade 2010. Cole is not a born writer. The memoir reads like a
plainspeak transcription: pinballing between his memories of his family
and poor childhood in Linnton and his first experiences in drag; his
days in the Army during the Korean War to meeting his loving longtime
partner and creative collaborator, Roxy.

Despite book’s the
bland tone, the value of Cole’s staggering 75 or so years’ worth of
recollections of PDX culture and nightlife are incalculable. His
descriptions of slurping pork noodles in Old Town while eyeballing
Chinese merchants in traditional garb with his mom in the 1930s, or
memories of Magic Garden as a lesbian club in the 1960s, are
fascinating. In one passage, he remembers the Hoyt Hotel’s Roaring 20s
club, a grand ballroom in Northwest Portland that had a full-time
harpist for the ladies’ room and a 12-foot-long trough urinal decorated
like a rock grotto for the men, festooned with fake forest animals with
targets on their heads. (“[There was also a] life-sized replica of Fidel
Castro...” Cole remembers. “If a gentleman could hit that open mouth,
lights would flash, sirens would go off and a huge waterfall would flush
the entire urinal.”)

Although Darcelle is
best known for her larger-than-life persona (“sequins on the eyelids,
lots of feathers, big hair, big jewels, and lots of wisecracks,” as Cole
puts it) what emerges from the book is a portrait of an energetic
businessman whose desire for a life less ordinary catapulted him from a
job at Fred Meyer to become the proprietor of a counterculture coffee
shop, an after-hours jazz club, a rough-’n’-ready “dyke bar” and,
finally, a nationally known drag revue, without ever leaving Portland.

It’s tough to read Just Call Me Darcelle without
yearning for more thoughtful commentary on Portland’s gay community at
large. Huge issues, like the fight over Oregon’s anti-gay Measure 9 in
1992, are glossed over in a single paragraph. But, then again, Darcelle
and her flock of roller-skating, bawdy-talking dames have always
primarily been about putting a smile on locals’ faces. Why should her
book be any different?